There HAS to be a better way to find orphan meshes

[Dragon Slave]

*groans*

I've known for a while now that my game was sitting atop a hoard of orhpaned/broken crap that wasn't showing up in game but being loaded anyways...But because I'm a lazy bum, I never did anything about it....Loading times took an hour, from the moment I click on the desktop icon till I'm inside the house I want to play, and the lag was horrible, but I managed anyways. 

I haven't played the sims for a while on my lappy tough, not since I transfered my neighborhoods and downloads (14 cd's worth) to my desktop computer since I had recently upgraded the RAM and it ran the game better.  But I'm considering starting it up again on my laptop so I can play pets while I'm at school. This time I'm a little more cautious about adding more to the already swollen folders.  Thus I figured a total clean out was in order.

 I thought that I could delete everything, then redownload the stuff that I liked...this would give me a fresh start.  But it also means that I'd lose those files that aren't available for download anymore.     This idea still isn't out of the question. 

I'd never bothered with SimPE's scanners before so I thought I give it a try.  I'm amazed at how well it worked for my clothing and hair foloders.  All of the files were correlcty identified, and I was able to delete alot of things I had forgotten I ever downloaded.  But what really needs work is my object folder.  there's no telling how many objects I've deleted in game...and as a whole, this folder is by far the largerst in my downloads. 

But why does it have to be so difficult to scan   Sure, it takes a while to go through all those files, but when I see "Scanning Material Overrides" (1/16414), then an hour an a half later, "Scanning Material Overrides" (18/16414) I draw the line.  It would take a week to go through all that, at the rate it's inching along.  Give or take, too long is too long. 

I first thought to divide the folder up and scan it in sections...but the fact that I'm looking for orphaned meshes makes it challenging since I will need to scan the meshes with all of the recolors, at any one time.  I thought I could move my meshes in to one folder, then divided my recolors up into many foloders.  Id' move a recolor folder into the download foldler where the meshes are, scan, and then disable(easier to locate) the meshes that show up as having associated recolors.  I'd leave SimPE, go to my downloads folder, and move out the files I disabled into a temporary folder somewhere else.  Then I'd move another recolor folder in and repeat the process till I've gone through all the foloders.  In the end, the only meshes remaining should be the ones that never showed up has having an associated recolor...and thus I've narrowed it down to the orphaned meshes......It would be a long process, but it was the best I could think of...till I actually looked at the number of files in my mesh directory.  3666.   That number in itself is discouraging.

In total, I have 10023 files in my objects folder.  2.90 G.  I guess the problem is I have too much....   But that isn't what's got me so.  It's that dern material overrides scanning that ticks me off.  Even if there were just 500 files to scan I'd be mad, 1000?  forget it.  Over 10000?  hah.   Maybe if it didn't take a minute or more to scan 1 one material override(whatever that is anyways).  It's wasn't like this with my clothing or hair folders.  I think I had 1 material override to scan for hair...18 for clothing...(does it deal with objects only?  I might have some files misplaced )


but anyways, it comes down to this beiing the problem.  Praticallity is the issue...I can't leave my laptop active for the time required to scan all those files.  So I wonder, how does everyone else manage?  I know there must be someone out there who's used the orphan mesh scanner with there objects before...did you encounter this same problem?  If so, how did you get by?  Is it necessary to scan material overrides?  Is it a step I can exclude?  What can I do?

Any help or advice would be appreciated...even if it doesn't deal with the orphan mesh scanner.  perhaps there's a better method or program out there to find these things   Anythign would be nice...but if all else fails, I guess I can go back to the delete everything idea...

[J. M. Pescado]

My suggestion is to nuke everything, and then next time, file things that require meshes in the directory with their meshes, so you can kill everything at once.

[Soylent Sim]

Backing up Pes, with a but.  Nuke everything on your laptop and start fresh.  Look through all your objects and find the ones you most like (keeping in mind the tradeoff between the amount of stuff you have available and the load times required for it).  Make one lot with your CC essentials, package it to a file, and load that lot to a temporary neighborhood.  Nothing but the CC you chose.  (Well, that and hacks, so as always clean pack installer is a good thing.)  Like the boss said from there, see what you can collect and rename for your convenience and subfolder things properly this time around. 

[Theo]

Odds are that you don't need to use the orphan mesh scanner on your objects folder. They work differently from hairs and clothes when you delete them from the game catalog, and in most situations you'll find orphaned object recolors.

My recommendation is to disable it when scanning your objects.

As for why the scanning code searches for mesh references in object files, well, god only knows 

[idtaminger]

I organize by creator. And I put recolours in the creator's file instead of the recolourer's. That keeps everything nice and easy to scan. I have 7Gigs of content, all neatly organized that way.

[Motoki]

My suggestion is to nuke everything, and then next time, file things that require meshes in the directory with their meshes, so you can kill everything at once.

Not only that, but save an image of the damned thing in the directory because half the time the names don't help you figure out what the hell it is at all.

[Ambular]

I agree with Dragon Slave on this, though.  With all the amazing tools people have churned out for organizing this stuff, I'm astounded nobody has thrown together a straightforward little app that identifies meshes without textures and vice versa and lets them be viewed and deleted from within the program.  (Heck, it'd make a great addition to Clean Installer.)

OTOH, I'm not a programmer.  Is there something in the nature of mesh files and recolors that makes this difficult or impractical to do?

[miros]

It's built into SimPE, but the methods of storing/displaying the object info are so memory consuming that it errs out if you've got very much stuff.

Yes, a free standing app would be great!

[Ambular]

And the SimPE scanner is either unreliable or the results are difficult to decipher.  It keeps reporting files that I know aren't orphans.  Plus you can't view the textures or delete files from within its list.

[Norahs]

I've used SimPe to find orphaned object textures but I had to do some prep work to avoid all of the issues mentioned above. And I didn't have to destroy the organization of my folder system.

Make a copy if the Downloads folder and run Clean Installer to find and move all the meshes to a new folder and move that to the  desktop or My Documents .  Delete the copy you made - so now you're left with a Downloads folder that contains all of your meshes and recolors and a folder on the desktop with a copy of all your meshes. Open up SimPe and go to Extra-Preferences-File Table. Hit the add tab and load the folder you placed on your desktop - hit ok. There will be a new line under Advanced Settings for the folder you just aded -check the box and hit Reload (you may have to do this a couple of times). The first time you run the Scan Folder tool you should clear the cache, this will make the scan take longer but it helps avoid some misreading of the files. If you have a lot of files you should organize them into smaller groupings to prevent the "out of memory exception" and run a scan the smaller groupings rather than your entire downloads folder. One thing I found was I had a lot of build objects that showed the mesh as missing - so tread carefully there. Also, there were a few meshes that that showed up as not having a mesh  -so,  if a file is listed as an object leave it alone.

This isn't 100% but I got much better results than I did when I used someone else's instructions.

Plus you can't view the textures or delete files from within its list.

You can't delete the files but you can disable them and then delete all the disabled files.

[Dragon Slave]

Look through all your objects and find the ones you most like (keeping in mind the tradeoff between the amount of stuff you have available and the load times required for it).  Make one lot with your CC essentials, package it to a file, and load that lot to a temporary neighborhood.

You know, I never thought of that   probably because I never upload sims or lots.  But this is a great idea.  Whenver I go through the catolouge file by file, I get hung up on keeping things that I might use later, or things that could be useful...this sounds like a good way to avoid all that nonsense, just to focus on the things I like the most then zapping the rest.  All of those little things I doubt I'd even miss.  But this sounds like it will work, guess I'll try it this weekend when I get ahold of my game disc again. 
 

Odds are that you don't need to use the orphan mesh scanner on your objects folder. They work differently from hairs and clothes when you delete them from the game catalog, and in most situations you'll find orphaned object recolors

 Then that explains why I found so many orphaned recolors when I scanned my objects a few days ago, while my hair and clothing folders turn up none.   Well, that's a releif that I won't have to deal with that material overide crap that takes a million years   I still bet there is some junk content though...maybe meshes that came along with packaged lots I downloaded, or ones that are corrupt.  I suppose this will be taken care of when I delete everything.

It's hard for me to stay organized.  When I download, I do everything right click save target as, then when I amass a large collection, everything is highlighted and extracted to the current folder.  The compressed files are deleted, and I copy and paste what I extracted into my downloads folder.  later I go back with Clean Installer and put things in the right catogories.  But that's as far as my organization goes.  It's hard to remember what's what when I go back several days later to sort though it. 

Right now though, I've been storing zips in a seperate archive from my downloads folder, organized by website and type of content.  After I clean everything out, I could just copy this structure that I've already created.  Thinking about it, that may help out alot.   

But yeah, I really would like to see something that would help me organize objects from outside the game.  I use bodyshop for hair, clothing, makeup, etc.  Clean installer for walls, floors, and terrians, but there is nothing that's efficient with objects.  I can't tell what object I'm dealing with by looking at the recolor maps.  I need to see the texture on the object     Sim PE is the only program I've found so far that let's me preview this, but it only works when the mesh is included, and I have to open each package seperatly in order to preview the geometric data container window. 

What I'd really like is something that's set up just like the buy mode catoluge in the game, that shows the thumbnail preview of what the object will look like and it's associated recolors as they're applied to the base mesh.  This way I can scan through the folder quickly without having to stop and open each file and wait for the preview to load before I can decide whether or not I want to keep it.
 

[Ambular]

Hmm, Paladin has released a version of his Categorizer which takes MUCH less time finding recolors for deletion than before, so getting rid of unwanted objects without leaving the textures behind should now be much easier, at least...